"In Late February, VMWare announced the release of ESX Server 3i, the first release of their embedded hypervisor platform for OEMs. Their initial list of partners who agreed to offer 3i hypervisors embedded in their servers is impressive--Dell, Fujitsu Siemens, HP and IBM. Hewlett-Packard will begin shipment of servers using 3i within the next week, in ten distinct models, and it is expected that similar announcements from the other Tier 1 system vendors will be made within the next few weeks.
"There are certainly a lot of reasons why you'd want hypervisors to be embedded in firmware--obviously tying it closer to the hardware platform gets you around a number of integration and performance issues, and it makes sense for it to be more aligned with the BIOS than the OS itself..."
